Posted on 02/25/2022 9:42:12 AM PST by Kaslin
”The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” is back, consistent as ever, gorgeous and immersive, clever and provocative. The show looks and feels as fresh as its first season, which hardly doubles as a critique given how great it was right out of the gate.
“Maisel” last aired on Dec. 6, 2019. It was, for me, the final binge before The Great Binge. As Midge moved into the ’60s, America moved into the ’20s. As Midge moved into the sexual revolution, America started questioning it. Watching “Maisel” now feels oddly discordant, like being asked to celebrate the take-off of a plane you know is going to crash.
Two episodes in, my one enduring complaint about “Maisel” stands: the snappy dialogue often veers into an insufferable, Sorkin-style rhythm. This season, that rhythm is complemented by another insufferable hallmark of Sorkin’s work — pretentious hero babble. “Maisel” always had some of that, to be sure, and it’s not nearly on the level of ”The Newsroom” or ”Studio 60.” But it’s a flaw.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel are leaning further into this bad habit just as the show is leaning further into second-wave feminism. Midge’s arc from housewife to housewife-slash-comic is always what gave the show an edge. Its heroine loves motherhood, fashion, and homemaking. She’s not merely another female comedian eschewing traditionalism for a life of debauchery. She wants to have it all.
I was reading Helen Roy’s reflections on ”Girl, Interrupted” this week when I realized they mirrored the problems with “Maisel.”
“What remains true and captivating across time is the underlying theme of the general story and of its individual characters: that participation in the then-emerging midcentury ideals of careerism and sexual licentiousness drives women crazy,” wrote Roy. She continues:
Women today can relate because in real life, these two forces remain crazy-making fixtures of modern society. The difference now is that these once basically distinct vanguard female archetypes of the midcentury (woman free to work on one hand, and woman free to fornicate on the other) at some point fused into one. Now, the pressure for women to become caricatures of a certain brand of masculine ambition and sexuality, is no longer an either/or proposition, and hasn’t been for a while[.]
Maisel cheerfully makes the case for this fusion as though the case is closed, and just as it’s been reopened. Roy argues “coronavirus killed the girlboss,” noting that younger millennial women were stripped of offices and bars while older millennial women dropped out of the workforce.
“As of October of 2021, three million women had left their jobs for ‘pandemic-related reasons,’” she noted. “Put simply, working from home while also having kids home from school highlighted the tension between domestic and professional responsibility that would have once been relieved through outsourcing.”
Women’s preferences have been clear for years, assuming you find biology to be a more credible explanation than ”internalized misogyny.” Christina Hoff Sommers has written about this for decades. “In a 2013 poll, Pew asked American mothers about their ‘ideal’ working arrangement,” she once noted. “Sixty-one percent said they would prefer to work part-time or not at all. Catherine Hakim, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, found similar preferences among Western European women.”
Sommers went on to quote a particularly apt Tina Brown line: “There are more tired wives who want to be Melania sitting by the pool . . . than there are women who want to pursue a PhD in earnest self-improvement.”
These are surveys of Western women decades into the experiment Midge is proudly running as “Maisel” progresses. And then there’s the coarsening. Midge is clearly meant to be among the pioneers forging a grand tradition of American stand-up. She befriends Lenny Bruce. Her story is borrowed at least in part from Joan Rivers. What made comedians of that time great were the boundaries they tested.
Camille Paglia penned a blistering critique of Instagram in 2018, reflecting on much of the changes congealing in “Maisel’s” fourth season. ”The sexual revolution sought and won by my 1960s generation envisioned women as responsible, mature free agents, equal to men,” said Paglia. “We certainly did not foresee that ‘booty pics,’ reducing women to their buttocks like Stone Age fertility totems, would become a wildly addictive genre of Instagram self-portraiture.”
“Ironically,” she later added, ”sexed-up online exhibitionism has escalated as Hollywood movies have steadily lost their once world-famous genius for portraying romantic passion… a movie ostensibly about sex, like the first installment of Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), was a lifeless and clinically antiseptic bore.”
Paglia argues that content codes enforced until roughly the 1960s resulted in sexier art. The contemporary comedians in Bruce’s league are the ones challenging new content codes instituted by Silicon Valley and Hollywood’s new moral puritans. They’re the women embracing the mysteries of femininity instead of joyless nudity and androgyny.
Paglia’s admitted lack of foresight is admirable and heterodox precisely because Amazon-backed writers like Sherman-Palladino remain blind to the emergent consequences of modern liberalism.
I’ve never been to a Justin Bieber concert, but I’ve yet to witness a frenzy quite like the one that consumed my poetry professors when Erica Jong came to campus, raspy and blonde, aged and sultry. “Fear of Flying” was so personal to them. They spoke of it reverently and treated her like a queen. These women were artists, some of them celebrated. What electrified them in the ‘60s and ’70s was change. But when the radical became the status quo, and the glow of newness faded, the women who came later were left to pick up the pieces.
This is becoming clear, even to the left. BuzzFeed, of all places, probed Gen Z’s mounting dissatisfaction with the normalized culture of “sex positivity” in a poignant investigation last year.
“It feels like we were tricked into exploiting ourselves [and] tricked into thinking it was our idea,” one girl explained.
Abigail Shrier has done yeoman’s work documenting the pains of young women baited by a normalized culture of leftist gender norms into causing ”irreversible damage” to their own bodies. In recent months, “Sex and the City” author Candace Bushnell and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg have started grappling with the consequences of the sexual revolution without daring to question their roots.
It’s true, we shouldn’t throw the baby of legal equality and genuine progress out with the bathwater of loneliness and pornography and all the painful manifestations of modern misery. But we shouldn’t pretend it’s clean either.
There’s one more season to come of “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” If she embraces the benefit of hindsight, Sherman-Palladino could make it even better.
-PJ
Well that was established last season. He’s big into the “clean” investment. Maybe out of liberal guilt, maybe out of knowing in our current world if you want to be a billionaire and not have the people pressuring the government to take you out you better be a “good” billionaire, with all that green energy and MAWOB in your portfolio. The guy is still a jerk though, he’s just smarter about his image than Axe.
i enjoy the show but Midge is such a crappy mom.
In an early episode she danced (or something) with bare boobs. Unacceptable on the public airwaves.
She did not "dance" with bare boobs. She entered the comedy club on a night where non-professional comics could get on stage and do their thing.
She had just come from home after her husband told her that he wanted a divorce because he had fallen in love with a (teenage) girl from his work.
She was so upset that she wandered around until she wandered into the comedy club and went onstage and did a rant about what had just happened to her. She also was pointing out that she kept her figure and she was pretty sexy; and, to prove that she took off her top to show how nice her boobs were.
She did not "dance around" or anything. She did make some very funny jokes.
I watched a rerun of that first episode; and, Amazon Prime had cut that piece of her rant out of the episode. So, I'm not sure anyone who would be watching that now, will actually see her bare boobs.
When this show first ran, I read a review of it and that writer said that it was loosely based on the life of Joan Rivers.
Maybe they will do to the kids what they typically do when they get in the way of the story line. You know- phase them out of the storyline. That’s what they did in Murphy Brown.
The clothing that Midge wears on her trip to Paris in Season 2, was outstanding, really great looks.
She has a nice rack, that’s for sure. I keep watching just in case she decides to whip them out again. ;-)
I will join you.
Currently the only show I watch is Alone. Ten people dropped out in the fall wilderness with limited tools.
If they don't have a season 9 I might drop TV entirely.
It is boring, because the star actress is not funny.
But you can’t have what the main character wants, marriage and family and safety for children, without chastity. She tells dirty jokes about her husband, not knowing he cheats. He’s unfaithful. Marriage over.
Continually pushing the envelope of public sexual discourse, searching for a new taboo to break for the shock value and the laugh is destructive of chastity.
There’s good reason for raunchy jokes to be told within same sex, same age groups.
So as Paglia says, some degree of prudish limitation protects romance, protects sexiness, and enables comedy. No taboos, no Lenny Bruce.
If the show ever questions the sexual revolution and the coarsening of public discourse, that would be bold.
The article was a word salad and I’m not sure what the point was.
Love Mrs. Maisel. Worth watching just for the fashion. People use to dress in beautiful clothes. The episodes in season 2 at the Catskills were great as was the Yom Kippur dinner episode. Every show on now has some preachy lefty crap in it and I pick and choose what shows I’ll put up with it. Conservatives have always been behind in infiltrating the arts. Andrew Breitbart understand this.
Agree. It is sort of like a female version of Seinfeld but set in the past. It is really funny for a new production as well. You see a lot of Joan Rivers in it.
For those of you who are open to it which I know is not many o of you, if you like period pieces, Seinfeld and Joan Rivers, you’ll likely find it watchable, which is better than most Hollywood productions these days...
Looks like “Mad Men” for women.
no, she just dumps her kids on her parents.
I'm with you. I saw the first season and a few episodes of the second. She plays a comedienne but her character isn't funny.
The second season wasn't entertaining at all. She's still not funny and the rapid fire Aaron Sorkin-esque dialogue is irritating.
I don't know which season it was but the show ripped Phyllis Schlafly in such an unfair way, calling her a monster among other things. It was quite over the top, and stupid.
This new season IS bad...my hub fell asleep while trying to watch. I just don’t find it that entertaining
I watched one episode when it came on and gave up, just wasn’t interesting to me.
Shows like that as they go on lose whatever they had to begin with and fade.
Yes...I do enjoy the fashions of that era...seems sexier than today’s bare it all
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